A draft? part two: “send me to Iraq and not my mother.”

I’m strangled by multiple deadlines today. But needed to hail Dwayne Betts, writing at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic site:

Right now my moms is at an airport in Maryland waiting on a plane to send her to Germany, then to Kuwait, then to Iraq. She turns fifty years old on Thursday. At first, I thought she was an anomaly. I believed that there were no other 40+ year old women headed to Iraq.

“I was wrong. With my mother there are at least two other women in their forties. It is a distressing thing to get emails describing training drills that involve jumping out of humvees and handling assault rifles.

You grow up watching GI Joe and all of the war movies and war is a glamourous thing. Even people who die seem to die heroically, or at least as a part of someone’s else’s hero tale. The wars are always fought by the young. You never see the weary eyes of a man who knows too much blood and is much too honest after three shots of bourbon. And yet, the failure to see what I’m beginning to recognize as the reality of war is not the disturbing thing.

What’s disturbing is how the President and Vice-President continue to talk about the 90,000 troops to be returning home from Iraq between now and summer. Just two days ago the AP quotes Biden as saying the Iraq war hasn’t been worth its “horrible price.” It also mentions the 90,000 combat troops. My mother and her friends, the people in her unit, platoon or whatever slang they use laugh at those numbers – because they have inherited the stories of the men and women they are replacing.

He goes on to talk about how his mom and others basically joined out of poverty, and ends his post with: “In a way, I feel like a draft, at least, would send me to Iraq and not my mother. Would send my cousins instead of women with new born babies. Instead of what seems like a lot of single mothers” like Alexis Hutchinson, who Betts had just discussed.

While I still think calling for a draft isn’t really the answer, as my previous posts have noted, Betts’ testimony is important, and has more weight with me than either Charles Rangel or the others who’ve asked for conscription lately.  Read the whole thing — then bookmark the site, because Ta-Nehisi’s shop is one of the best even when its brilliant padrone’s not in the house.